Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate
Subtitle: culture, politics, and institutions
By: Edward Holberton.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Oxford, England; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 249
ISBN-13: 9780199544585
Subjects: Cromwell, Oliver, -- 1599-1658; English poetry -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; Literature and society -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century; Politics and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 17th century; Social institutions in literature; Great Britain -- History -- Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1660
Description: "The Cromwellian Protectorate's instabilities helped to generate lively and innovative poetry. This new account of the period focuses on key cultural institutions - Parliament, an embassy to Sweden, Oxford University, Cromwell's state funeral - to examine poetry's relationship with a culture in transformation and crisis." "Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate asks how poetry confronted questions that were complicated by institutional practices, how poets tried to square their wider cultural sympathies with their interests in a particular parliamentary or university crisis, and how changes in institutions afforded poets critical insights into their society's problems and its place in the world. The readings of this book challenge previous representations of Protectorate culture as a phase of conservative back-sliding, or pragmatic compromise, under a quasi-monarchical order. Protectorate verse emerges as nuanced and vital writing, which looks beyond the personality of Oliver Cromwell to the tensions that shaped his power. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate argues that it is precisely through being contingent and compromised that these poems achieve their vitality, and become so revealing."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.